a simple plea

While everyone's eagerly planning SL improvements or demanding major bug fixes, can I toss in my one tiny request?

A minimize button on Inventory, like there is on every other single window in SL. What the hell?

The big move

We had an unexpected opportunity to move from our single lot to two adjacent lots on Winterfell, and after a little bit of discussion, we took it. It was not a small decision, both because it will cost more and because it meant having to move our castle.

That second one may have been the more daunting part. Even pre-fab castles are fairly complex to assemble, and this one had given us trouble when we first placed it. But we finally decided the doubled space would be worth the trouble. Not only would it give us more land and more prim allowance, it also gave us an ocean view on one side.

The first thing we did after making the necessary purchases was to take the foundation out from under the castle and use it as a pattern to find the best place for it on the other lot. That left the castle itself hanging in space for a short time.

The new location not only gave us double the space, but a lovely lengthwise riverfront, and that was the logical place to site it, so Morgana laid the foundation in. Then we took a deep breath and got ready to move the inidividual pieces of the building. But Tim Hoffman's castle aligner saved us. One command and almost all of the pieces flew across the landscape and put themselves together. The small number that didn't were easy to bring over. As unimpressed as we remain with his customer service, I have to give him due credit for that aligner script. It works wonders.

The land itself a needed a little maintenance. Returning the previous owner's trees was easy but we noticed most of the ocean had been terraformed so there was no usable water. I set about to scale that back.




For a finishing touch on the ocean side I made a small pier, while Morgana planted trees. All in all, what could have been a pretty complex operation went smoothly and we're starting to put the furniture back in.

We've had three addresses in a short time, but this is likely to be home for a while. It's big enough, the theme of the sim fits our tastes, and we have good neighbors and good landlord. Home sweet second life home.

Service, Please

People who run businesses in Second Life must understand the importance of customer service. Just like in real life, some creators are happy to help their customers use their creations, and others seem to vanish right after counting your money.

A case in point from our own experience: We bought a castle from Qabalah Quintus. When we needed some customization, he built us replacement pieces with no hesitation. When he upgraded our model of castle, he provided us a new one with a nominal upgrade fee. Anytime he was online and we had questions, he answered right away. If he was offline, he answered as soon as he could.

Result: We'll be pleased to recommend him to anyone we meet looking for a castle home.

As pleased as we were with his service, however, the castle itself just didn't work for us. After living in it for a while, we found it a little small for our needs and a little out of place in our area. So we shopped for a new one and ultimately bought a high-priced but roomy one from another designer. It featured a control panel to allow the owner(s) to control door locks, window tint and other variables from a single interface, and also had a building aligner tool that is supposed to pull all the pieces together once rezzed.

The aligner worked. Not much else did. Morgana started trying to set up and accidentally delinked the prims that made up the central piece. The designer came over to help only after about a week of repeated IMs.

Once it was set up, things were fine until we realized thet only Morgana had access to most of the control panel menus and I was limited to tinting the windows. No problem, we'll just change ownership to our group (a group that includes just the two of us). So she did, and voila! We now have the same priviliges with the panel. Only one problem: The prviliges we both have are the limited set I had before the change. Now she can't get to the rest of the settings either.

We figured out how to lock the doors with a voice command, but when we did that, the windows turned black. Untinting the windows also unlocked the doors.

So we IMed the designer again. And again. And again. Over what has now been at least two weeks, maybe three. Granted it has been the holiday season, but that's a long time, and we still have had no response. We finally solved the door locking problem by buying a new set of doors from a different creator and installing them ourselves.

Result: We'll tell other people that his building is fine, but his scripting is bad and his service (unless he does finally respond with a really good explanation for the silence) is terrible. And we won't buy anything else from him.

Someone's been sleeping in my bed

I have to remember to take a snapshot when these things happen -

We've been having a little problem with the door to our castle, Serenity Hall. It's not a huge crisis. No one can take anything, after all, and we have this lovely home so I don't really mind people wandering.

But in the past few days, there've been a lot of unexpected drop ins, mostly people less than a week old and this surprises me since Winterfell is a private residential sim. By and large, they've been friendly and polite, and like I say - I have no real problem with people enjoying our home.

But the other day I was caught off guard. I was practicing building downstairs and suddenly noticed a pair of names hovering just below the ceiling. Someone was upstairs. I aimed my camera that way and there were the cutest pair of brand new baby vampires, not more than two days old, cosied up in our bed. They looked very sweet and I flatly wasn't sure what to do. It was like discovering a pair of deer in your backyard - you don't want them to stay there permanently, eating your garden, but you don't want to startle them too quickly, either.

The evil part of me was strongly tempted to start quoting The Three Bears. "Someone's been sleeping in my bed... and they're still there!" But they were so cute and fresh faced (as the undead go) that that seemed mean. And I really didn't know what sort of protocol I should adopt for this... just go back to my building and say hi when then came down? Ask them if they'd at least wash the sheets before they leave?

Finally, I decided to pull out my ocarina, sit down and start playing it, to announce my presence in the least intrusive way possible. Sure enough, one jumped up and quickly 'ported out and the other also stood up and milled around for a few seconds (looking for the source of the sudden music maybe?) and then also left.

And that's when I first considered that I should have taken a picture.

Today we bought and installed a new door that locks properly, so hopefully the number of drop ins will decrease. Not that we mind visitors - really we don't. But ring the bell and let us invite you in. And stay out of our bed, 'k?

That can't be good

Number one on my list of messages I never want to see while crashing is a comment about how the asset database hardware is failing.

I'm not entirely sure what that means, but assets is, like, stuff, right? And the number identifiers that belong to all our things, places money and our avatars themselves?

heh... that message made for a rather abrupt end of the evening. They're still down, doing 'clean up'. In my non-technical fantasies I have a picture of everyone's bulging inventory closets bursting open and spraying clothes, shoes, and oh yes dreaded chickens-on-a-stick all over the virtual yard like a pissed off girlfriend.

Way Back When

Back in the day, we used to go to casinos and sit in camping chairs and think it was great to come away with $L24 for an hour of doing nothing.

This is my first post here, and since Morgana shared her newbie thoughts already, I'm also tripping down memory lane. What gets me about Second Life is how quickly it came to feel like a second home. The camping chairs? It's a distant memory now and feels like it could have been years ago, but we've only been in SL about 10 weeks.

I have memories of places visited early on that I would be hard pressed to find again, simply because I didn't landmark them and they are just vague scraps of recollection now. Morgana and I have dance clubs and shops that we haven't been to in what seems like months, but there's no way it could be more than a few weeks.

I do remember the day I joined, just a few hours after Morgana did. I wandered around the welcome area, tried out the various tutorials for movement and camera control, and slowly figured out that there was a lot here to explore. Looking back on it now, that day feels like a very long time ago.

First Land

This makes me happy that we hung onto our First Land lots. Mickey and I bought a pair of side by side 512m lots at the First Land rate shortly after we got to SL and joined them under a group composed of the two of us. It's PG, a fact we didn't notice until after we'd purchased it. We might have chosen elsewhere if we had, but honestly I think that might have kept some of the worst of the ugly landsprawl I've seen in other relatively young regions from happening. (Oh yes, it does exist here, but not as badly as it might have.)

We homesteaded there for awhile in a freebie A-frame cabin with a rocker on the porch, and it was a peaceful place to rest between sightseeing excursions until the inevitable urban blight crept in. Our own stubbornness crept in, too - we were getting offers but they were from people who had already messed up the view from our porch with pointless skycrapers (empty except for one small sign announcing willingness to buy land) and rotating signage, and we were damned if we were going to sell to them.

Then we bought our current home on a private sim, and started wondering what we should do with our original plot. After a conversation with a neighbor, we've created the Haemosu Public Park which is composed of our lot and his lots. Just trying to beautify the neighborhood and encourage people to create space worth spending time in. No ugly twirling signs, please!


We're not sure exactly how we want to lay it out - currently its mostly set up as a way to block ugly portions of the view when you're standing on the grounds. But as I was typing this, a newbie came wandering by and took off all his clothes, so I'm thinking that perhaps we need a public rest area here for non-landowners needing to change! (In this case, I'm pretty sure it was a case of newbie trying out his indecent exposure skills... poor guy. Buy the right parts, first.)